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In Sweden most educational levels rely more and more on electronic platforms that are used in pre-schools and schools where each pupil receives a profile into which teachers, school administrators, the school’s health team, parents and of the pupil him/herself, has access to. The platform provides information of the pupils’ progress in different disciplines, grades and projects are presented through text, photographs and video clips. The attempt of this paper is to discuss the platforms as a mean to the internalization of techniques of monitoring the self. This is particularly interesting when it comes to health discourses related to the social body, the national body and the individual body.
The school as institution has traditionally relied on and created groups and assessed the individual in relation to these groups. Eventually the system changes to focus primarily on the pupil as individual from the beginning. This gives a perceived freedom to a tailored education for each pupil, though it is a freedom with limits.
The empirical material of the study consists of variations of electronical platforms used by Swedish schools. The material will be genealogically analysed. The method used could be characterized as netnography or online ethnography.
The expected outcome of this study is to relate the archaeological and genealogical discussions of subject creation (processes of subjectifications) to the practises presented themselves through software. In contemporary school systems, a portion of the articulation of these practises are presented through electronical platforms.

In recent years, character education and virtue ethics have undergone a form of renaissance in the philosophy of education (Sanderse, 2015). Virtue and character are Aristotelian notions that amount to key components of an ethical life. The Aristotelian conception of the highest good to strive toward (in life as well as in education) is expressed through the notion of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is commonly taken to denote a form of happiness in the sense of a life well lived or a flourishing life. This form of happiness is construed as an end in itself and it is therefore also reasonable to posit eudaimonia as the end-goal of character education. Consequently, character education may be said to aim at ‘the formation of somebody’s character, which accommodates a whole range of virtues and in which cognition and emotion ideally form a unity’ (p. 383).
Early modern rationalist Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1670) is a largely neglected philosopher in the context of the philosophy of education. In part, this can be explained by the fact that Spinoza never wrote any texts addressing education explicitly. This neglect is regrettable, however, since Spinoza offers a profound ethical theory – firmly grounded in his metaphysical system – raising important questions relevant for contemporary moral education.
In his posthumously published magnum opus, the Ethics (first published in 1677), Spinoza writes that ‘[t]he striving to preserve oneself is the first and only foundation of virtue’ (4p22c). This conception of virtue has led Spinoza scholars to conclude that Spinoza is best read as an ethical and psychological egoist (e.g. Nadler, 2013). As Genevieve Lloyd points out, this means that for Spinoza ‘[s]elf-seeking – traditionally opposed to rational virtue – now becomes its foundation’ (1996, p. 9). At the same time, Spinoza’s ethical theory is often described in terms of a form of eudaimonistic ethics, highlighting the importance of developing a virtuous character for reaching a state of happiness or human flourishing (Kisner, 2011).
This paper proposes an outline of a form of character education based on Spinoza’s ethical egoism, arguing that the self-preservation of the teacher is the main motivation for the Spinozistic teacher. Since the self-preservation of the teacher is conditioned by the moral development of the students – by virtue of Spinoza’s doctrine of the imitation of the affects – this, however, requires a reciprocal set-up, where the student is emulating the teacher (as role model) so that the teacher, in turn, may emulate his or her students. The paper closes by considering how a Spinozistic character education can facilitate the escape from bondage – for teacher and students alike.
Method
This paper makes for a philosophical discussion engaging with relevant parts of Spinoza's moral theory. It also draws from recent contributions discussing the pros and cons of Aristotelian character education so as to be able to investigate how a Spinozistically conceived model of character education could serve to address some perceived shortcomings of an Aristotelian model.
Expected Outcomes
A Spinozistic model of character education is centered on furthering the self-preservation of the teacher and students alike. Since the self-preservation of one is conditioned by the self-preservation of the other, this egoistic striving is greatly benefited by benevolence and friendship. Successful self-preservation is the foundation of virtue and the means to this end are construed as anything that empowers us. What empowers us most, however, is an adequate understanding of ourselves and our marginal place in the world which is why this kind of knowledge is the object of a Spinozistic character education. To gain this kind of knowledge requires practical experimentation, as we need to find out individually how different things affect us so as to get more information about our affective capabilities. It is greatly benefited, however, by being guided by general dictates of reason making sure that we strive for things that really do empower us rather than things that are only seemingly good for us. Moreover, a Spinozistic character education is guided by a strong sense of community insofar as the things that benefit our striving to persevere the most are available to all and can be enjoyed by all equally. This means that there is no reason to compete over the good, but instead, all the more reason to help others strive for it since the striving of others like me will benefit me in my own striving (4p18s). This amounts to a model of character education that is unhampered by the problematic notion of a free will and that can combine a strong sense of eudaimonism with a constructivist understanding of moral values.

In 1958, Hannah Arendt published “The Crisis in Education” 1 addressing what she considered to be the poor state of contemporary American education. While the causes of this educational crisis was identified as part of much broader processes of social and political change, education stood out as a social arena where the effects of these transformations became most obvious. One of the most manifest symptoms of the crisis in education concerned the lack of authority in modern societies. Arendt claimed that this lack of authority eroded the fundamental relation between teacher and student and the mutual trust necessary for safeguarding the social position of the teacher. In this paper, we aim to use Arendt’s concept of authority in order to diagnose a current crisis in Swedish education, arguing that it may help us understand the role of the teacher in a way that offers a point of view missing in the current debate on Swedish education.

This article begins with the question: What is it to live? It is argued that, from a Spinozistic perspective, to live is not an either/or kind of matter. The educational problem, emanating from this, concerns the tension between Spinoza's necessitarianism and the overall goal of education. In addressing these problems, this paper marks an attempt to present a pedagogization of the degrees of existence in Spinoza.